Narrowing the internet

[michael perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From here, it will be easier to let corporations follow China and make
free communication via the Internet difficult.


January 15, 2006
Digital Domain


 Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still Wants to Be Free

By RANDALL STROSS

AT the top of my wish list for next year's Consumer Electronics Show is
this: the introduction of broadband service across the country that is
as up to date as that 103-inch flat-screen monitor just introduced by
Panasonic. The digital lifestyle I see portrayed so alluringly in ads is
not possible when the Internet plumbing in our homes is as pitiful as it
is. The broadband carriers that we have today provide service that
attains negative perfection: low speeds at high prices.

It gets worse. Now these same carriers - led by Verizon Communications
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=VZ>
and BellSouth
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- want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying
the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying
for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content
that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas.

Slow broadband seems to be our cursed lot. Until we get an upgrade - or
rather an upgrade to an upgrade - the only Americans who will enjoy
truly fast and inexpensive service will be those who leave the country.
In California, Comcast
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cable broadband provides top download speeds of 6 megabits a second for
a little more than $50 a month. That falls well short, however, of
Verizon's 15-megabit fiber-based service offered on the East Coast at
about the same price. But what about the 100-megabit service in Japan
for $25 month? And better, much better: Stockholm's one-gigabit service
- that is, 1,000 megabits, or more than 1,300 times faster than
Verizon's entry-level DSL
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service - for less than 100 euros, or $120, a month.

One-gigabit service is not in the offing in the United States. What the
network carriers seem most determined to sell is a premium form of
Internet service that offers a tantalizing prospect of faster, more
reliable delivery - but only if providers like Google
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Yahoo
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and Microsoft
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pay a new charge for special delivery of their content. (That charge, by
the way, would be in addition to the regular bandwidth-based Internet
connection charges that their carriers already levy.)

An executive vice president of Verizon, for example, said last week that
the proliferation of video programs offered via the Internet opens a new
opportunity for his company: a new class of premium online delivery for
Web sites wishing to pay extra to give smooth video streams to their
customers in the Verizon service area. The executive, Thomas J. Tauke,
said that a fast lane for premium content providers would not reduce the
quality of regular service for everyone else, and that sites could
choose not to sign up without suffering retribution. "To the best of my
knowledge," he said, "there's no negative."

From the consumer's perspective, given the dismal state of the status
quo, shouldn't any service improvement be welcomed? The short answer is:
not necessarily.

For one thing, the occasional need for a preferential fast lane for
streaming video - that is, moving pictures displayed as fast as they
arrive, rather than downloaded first and played from memory - exists in
the United States only because our standard broadband speeds are so
slow. Were we ever to become a nation with networks supporting gigabit
service, streaming video would not require special handling.

Perhaps more important, the superabundance of content in the Internet's
ecosystem is best explained by its organizing principle of "network
neutrality." The phrase refers to the way the Internet welcomes everyone
who wishes to post content. Consumers, in turn, enjoy limitless choices.
Rather than having network operators select content providers on our
behalf - the philosophy of the local cable company - the Internet allows
all of us to act as our own network programmers, serving a demographic
of just one person.

Today, the network carrier has a minor, entirely neutral role in this
system - providing the pipe for the bits that move the last miles to the
home. It has no say about where those bits happened to have originated.
Any proposed change in its role should be examined carefully, especially
if the change entails expanding the carrier's power to pick and choose
where bits come from - a power that has the potential to abrogate
network neutrality.

This should be taken into account when Baby Bells say they need to
extract more revenue from their networks in order to finance service
improvements. Consumers will pay one way or the other, whether directly,
as Internet access fees, or indirectly, as charges when a content
company opts for special delivery and passes along its increased costs
to its customers. It would be better for the network carriers to
continue to do as they have, by charging higher rates for higher
bandwidth. (Sign me up for that one-gigabit service.)

Left unmentioned in Verizon's pitch is the concentration of power that
it enjoys in its service area, which would allow it to ignore the
equal-access principle whenever it wishes. We are asked to take on faith
that it and the other telephone companies with similar plans will handle
ordinary network traffic with the same care they would show if they had
not begun parallel businesses for the carriage trade. How likely is that?

Vinton G. Cerf has as good a claim as anyone to being the "father" of
the Internet - he was the co-author in the 1970's of key protocols that
define it. He worked for many years at MCI
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and joined Google last year. After hearing a description of Verizon's
contemplated offering of a premium delivery service for video, he was
skeptical that Verizon and other broadband carriers, would adhere to
promises to keep their networks open.

Mr. Cerf said that back in the 1990's, when the Web arrived, consumers
could choose from among hundreds of dial-up service providers, without
geographical constraints. But "as broadband developed," he added, "the
set of choices telescoped to zero, one or two," and the lack of choice
means that "we now have a serious issue on our hands."

Woe to us all if the Internet's content is limited by the companies who
also handle the plumbing. "The Future of Ideas," by Lawrence Lessig
(Random House, 2001), shows how innovation and creativity associated
with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a
commons that is accessible, by design, to all. Professor Lessig, who
teaches law at Stanford, said last week that even now, broadband
carriers have failed to demonstrate their commitment to the principle of
network neutrality. "They've fought it at each stage," he said, "and
they have never embraced the principle."

An illustration of his point popped up the same day. In an interview,
William L. Smith, the chief technology officer at BellSouth, described
to me his company's trial offering in West Palm Beach, Fla., last year
of a speedy download service for Movielink content. When asked whether
BellSouth would offer its special service on an exclusive basis to a
particular content site and agree to exclude the sponsor's rivals, he
did not hesitate in treating the question as a matter of simply settling
on the right price. The N.F.L. and Nascar strike exclusive distribution
deals, he said. Why not network carriers?

The largest Internet companies are the ones that could easily afford
whatever terms the carriers demand for exclusive deals that would lock
out smaller rivals and new entrants. But they have not done special
deals with the carriers and instead have joined together to try to
persuade Congress to protect the principle of network neutrality and
prevent the Bells from striking exclusive deals with anyone. Last
November, Amazon
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eBay
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=EBAY>,
Microsoft and Google, among others, formally registered their concern
with a House committee that is revising the basic telecommunications
law; they noted that a draft version of the bill failed to make network
neutrality a matter of policy without exception. Whether the committee
has responded positively to the suggestions from the Internet players
should be known soon.

IN his debut keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show two weeks
ago, one of Google's founders, Larry Page, credited the "dreamers in
universities" who had had the foresight to create a network system
without gatekeepers, which made it "maximally flexible" to permit the
unplanned appearance of the World Wide Web. That, in turn, had made
possible the unplanned appearance of Google.

More unplanned appearances will follow - but only if the ecosystem is
protected from tromping telephone companies that are genetically
incapable of understanding "maximally flexible."

Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley.
E-mail:ddomain@xxxxxxxxx

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901